How to Design a Nature Environment in Memory of a Beloved Cat

Introduction

Hello! My name is Dylan Jiu, and I'm currently an Environment Artist at NaturalMotion. What first pulled me toward environment art was the feeling of stepping into game worlds that had a strong identity of their own. Whether it was landing on the beach in Halo: Combat Evolved or exploring the different "theme-park" style zones of World of Warcraft, these games showed me how environments can be used to tell stories, convey vastly different identities, and shape worlds.

After studying Game Art at Full Sail University, I further developed my skills through a combination of online tutorials, courses, and personal work. I've spent the last eight years contributing to multiple environments for the CSR Racing series, where I've built an understanding of production workflows and environment creation within a team setting.

Naledi's Rest

Naledi's Rest didn't begin with a fully defined concept. It started from an initial spark that was shaped by the art direction of Ghost of Yotei, especially its heightened color, atmosphere, and cinematic storytelling. I was also very drawn to Japanese ukiyo-e, particularly the work of Hasui Kawase.

This project started more as an environment study inspired by Ghost of Yotei's world and a chance for me to push specific areas of my workflow. I wanted to create every asset myself as a way to strengthen my environment art processes, with a focus on material authoring as well as foliage creation. This led me to begin with a Substance 3D Designer river rock material, followed by early grass assets and tree sculpting.

As the scene took shape, it also became much more personal. It naturally became a dedication to our 21-year-old cat, Naledi, who passed away a year earlier. I think personal work often develops that way. Sometimes the meaning of a project reveals itself as you build it, and that's totally okay! The important part is to just start.

Once the direction became clearer, references played a big role in shaping the final environment. I looked at Princess Mononoke, Japanese temples, forest environments, and natural details such as stone, moss, and vegetation. Those influences eventually came together in the idea of a quiet, shrine-filled islet, which felt like the right setting for Naledi's Rest. The image below shows a few of these key references from my PureRef board.

Composition/Blockout

The project originally started at a much larger scale, but I realised that the scope was too broad for the level of quality and focus I wanted. Rescoping it into a smaller, more manageable environment was one of the most important decisions I made, and it's probably one of the biggest lessons I would pass on to artists starting their journey. It allows you to focus on doing a few things well, rather than simply getting many things done.

Once the scene became more manageable, I could concentrate on building a clear focal hierarchy. Using Unreal's landscape and water body systems, I could easily start sculpting the terrain and establishing the foundation of the environment. The exact focal point, however, did not appear immediately. I knew the composition needed a strong visual anchor, but the idea of a "Cat Shrine" did not come to me until I had already started on the block-out. 

The sculpted tree was always intended to be one of the hero assets, but it was also a major compositional tool. Its curved shape helped frame the focal area and guide the eye back toward the shrine. Even at this blockout stage, I was already testing cinematic hero shots, and many of those early camera angles stayed very close to the final presentation. Cinematic cameras in Unreal Engine are really useful for this purpose! I also blocked in some lighting to give me a better sense of atmosphere and readability.

Cat Statue

The cat statue wasn't a technically complex asset, but it was one of the most important. Its design was influenced by Japanese Inari Shrines. A detail that I took direct inspiration from was the yodarekake around the cat's neck. I thought this detail would not only help round out the statue with a story, but also create a strong visual focus through its bright red color.

I also used Egyptian cat statues as a reference. Interestingly, a lot of the ones I found were very symmetrical, usually depicting the cat sitting upright and looking straight ahead. Inari shrine statues, on the other hand, often feel much more dynamic and asymmetrical, sometimes even a bit intimidating. I tried to find a middle ground in the pose, keeping some of the asymmetry of the Inari references while still holding onto the reverence and stillness I liked in the Egyptian statues.

One part of the workflow that was a bit different was that I actually started the sculpt on my iPad in ZBrush, then brought it onto my computer to finish. I found that transition very straightforward, since the core ZBrush workflow feels very consistent across both.

Wind-Swept Tree

I first sculpted the hero trunk and main branches in ZBrush to get the silhouette and curves I wanted. After importing the mesh into SpeedTree, I used mesh helpers to draw custom spines that followed the sculpted forms. Those spines let SpeedTree treat the sculpted trunk/branches as a guide, from which I could procedurally generate additional branches and cards. It also allows SpeedTree to use its wind system for those custom mesh parts. SpeedTree has a great tutorial that explains this process.

SpeedTree's force system is simple to set up and incredibly powerful. There are several different force types for various use cases. For example, the Geometry force allows branches to interact with custom meshes, which is especially useful for creating intricate vine details. In my case, I wanted this tree to have a wind-swept look, so the Magnet force was great for this.

Wind-Swept Tree Material

I used two UV sets for the material setup. The first UV set was laid out to maintain a consistent texel density and to orient the shells in a way that worked with the directionality of the tileable bark material. The second UV set was a 0-1 unwrap that was used to support unique baked information like the Normal/AO map and other Mask maps. Below is the shader setup in Unreal Engine, of which I go into further detail below. 

I started with the main tileable bark material (authored in Substance 3D Designer), and used the baked AO and cavity information as a dirt mask to multiply a color parameter into the base color. I then added a detail normal so the material would hold up better in close-up shots, with parameters for enabling it, adjusting its strength, and changing its tiling.

When blending the normals, remember to use BlendAngleCorrectedNormals to keep the result behaving properly. The next part of the shader was the moss layer. This uses world-aligned textures, with a world-aligned blend driving a Z-up mask for moss growth. I broke that mask up with tiled noise so the moss would not appear too evenly across upward-facing surfaces.

For additional control, I also packed a unique painted moss mask with the unique AO map. That mask was painted in Substance 3D Painter and let me remove moss where I did not want it to grow. Finally, I blended in the unique baked Normal map, with a separate control over its strength.

Rocks

The rocks in the scene use an RGB mask workflow. I began by sculpting the forms in ZBrush, mainly using Trim Smooth Border with a square alpha to establish planar surfaces. I only sculpted two primary boulders, knowing I could rotate, scale, and combine them in Unreal Engine to create variation throughout the scene. For the game-ready meshes, I used Decimation Master and then unwrapped them in Maya.

After baking the high-poly information in Substance 3D Painter, I created an RGB mask to control the material blending in Unreal Engine. Using custom user channels in Substance 3D Painter, I assigned the red channel to drive the blend between two tiling rock materials, the blue channel to control edge brightening, and the green channel to add a dirt multiply. For further reference, Casper Wermuth has a great tutorial going through this workflow.

Below is the final rock shader setup I used in Unreal Engine. In all of my Unreal Engine shaders, I try to keep the graphs as organised as I can so they stay readable and easier to debug later. One way I do that is by building each material as its own reusable Material Function, then blending them with Material Layer Blend nodes.

Another tool I learned about recently is the Named Reroute node. It's a really nice way of routing the same value to multiple places in the graph without having wires running all over the shader. Coming from Substance 3D Designer, it felt very familiar since it works a lot like Dot/portal nodes.

Foliage

The workflow for the foliage assets was relatively straightforward. For the Japanese pachysandra, I first sculpted four leaf variations and the buds based on reference. These sculpts were then baked onto planes to create the textures in Substance 3D Painter. From there, I built the cards in SpeedTree and used its procedural tools to generate the plant.

Once I was happy with the result, I brought the asset into Unreal Engine and used Foliage Painter to integrate it into the scene. It also uses a SpeedTreeColorVariation node in its material for some subtle color variation. The grass and wood sorrel clover assets were completed with a similar workflow, but their cards and meshes were assembled in Maya instead of SpeedTree.

I also used SpeedTree to create the background Sugi trees and their custom pine branch textures. The pine branches are surprisingly easy to author in SpeedTree, and by nature, the software offers a lot of control and variation. SpeedTree has a comprehensive demo on how this is done.

River Rocks

For the river rock material, I was really inspired by Jared Sabotta's River Rock Breakdown, but instead of first sculpting the rocks in ZBrush, I wanted to see how far I could get with just using Substance 3D Designer. Again, a big goal of this project was to just practice Substance 3D Designer, and it seemed like an achievable challenge. The image below is the result of this.

I first started with a custom rock generator that gave me effectively infinite variation from a single base setup.

From there, I fed the generator output into a series of Tile Samplers that were layered and blended together to build up the final distribution.
A classic problem with relying on Tile Sampler for distribution is overlapping forms. I tried to overcome this by using a mask map input derived from the combined result of the previous samplers.

That way, each new layer was "aware" of the areas that were already occupied, which helped prevent intersections. It wasn't perfect, and it required a lot of tweaking, but it gave me a believable result.

Since I was using Unreal Engine's Landscape tools, I built a shader around Landscape Layer Blends so I could paint different materials directly onto the terrain. I also used Nanite displacement for this setup, and Peyton Varney has some great tutorials on how this is done. It's definitely more of a luxury feature, but for this personal project, it gave me a nicer final result. Below are the main materials used in the shader, along with a demo of the landscape painting process.

Lighting

My main goal with the lighting was to create a calm, reverent atmosphere. A big inspiration for the mood was the scene in Princess Mononoke where Ashitaka is brought into the cedar forest and healed by the Forest Spirit. It has a really serene, mystical, ancient feeling to it, almost slightly uncanny, and that was a big influence on the mood of Naledi's Rest. Another piece that influenced my lighting choices was "Forgotten" by Gannon Faust Jaspering. I really liked how clear the focal point felt, and how much depth the atmosphere gave the scene.

I set a directional light at a very low intensity to act as moonlight. It is mostly there to give a bit of shape to the scene and to create some nice rim light on the assets. Most of the actual focus comes from a key spotlight. I used it to shape the shrine area and guide the eye more clearly with its falloff. The cat statue in particular has its own focal light to help pull attention toward it, and I used Unreal Engine's lighting channels to achieve this.

I also brought the final cinematic into DaVinci Resolve to edit the sequence together. Following William Faucher's Unreal Engine to Resolve workflow, I used Movie Render Queue to export EXR sequences in Linear sRGB, which I then converted to sRGB gamma 2.2 in Resolve. The main advantage of this workflow was that it preserved the full dynamic range of the render and gave me more flexibility when grading, especially if I needed to recover highlights or lift shadows.

That said, I only did a small amount of color grading so the shots felt more cohesive, rather than trying to heavily change the look. Resolve's node-based workflow made it easy to carry grades across shots while still allowing for small adjustments. I still have a lot to learn about lighting and color grading, but I always enjoy the process! Please check out the final cinematic, if you haven't already!

Conclusion

One of the biggest takeaways from this project was how much stronger an environment becomes once its focus is clear. Early on, the scene was too large in scope and less certain in its direction. However, once I reduced its size and leaned into the shrine as the emotional center, everything started to come together more naturally.

Naledi's Rest also reminded me that creative work does not always begin with its full meaning already defined. Sometimes, certain ideas only become clear through the process of making. What began as a study in materials, foliage, and asset creation gradually became something much more personal. That personal meaning gave the project a stronger sense of purpose, which helped carry me through the rest of the process.

My biggest advice for beginners would be not to start too big. A smaller scene with a clear focal point and a strong mood will usually teach you more than a huge environment that is difficult to finish. It is also worth choosing a project that genuinely means something to you or something you actually like because that connection can help you through the slower parts of the process.

Lastly, I'd like to thank 80 Level for being such a valuable resource for the community. I've personally learned a lot from this site over the years! Thanks very much for reading. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to contact me on ArtStation or LinkedIn!

Dylan Jiu, Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine